In the concluding scene of Palestine 36, Afra (Wardi Eilabouni), a young Palestinian girl and a carrier of the knowledge of her culture, ancestors and the atrocities committed against them, walks barefoot through the stone streets of Jerusalem.
This image, following the razing of Afra’s village, the torturing of her community, the destruction of her home by the British army and the murder of her family, is haunted by a question. Afra’s grandmother, in a conversation between the two earlier in the film, posits that she will come to possess something more powerful than any empire or army. What that is, neither Afra nor her grandmother confides in us.
It was during a scene in which Palestinian dock workers plan a strike that I heard whispering beside me and glanced over. In the seats next to mine, a man and a young boy (around Afra’s age) were watching. It seemed to me he was the only child in the audience.
As I watched a history of my country I was unfamiliar with, I eavesdropped on the hushed conversations of the man and the boy. The father whispered explanations of what a strike was, the word for Rabbi, what partition meant and more.
There is an understandable desperation from a personal and public perspective to understand the history that could facilitate the abject suffering we see in Palestine today.
In the two years since October 7th, the counterattack perpetrated by the Israeli government and the IDF has resulted in a death toll- including civilians- of hundreds of thousands. The bombing of hospitals and schools and the forced displacement of Palestinian people with blockades preventing aid from reaching civilians, have culminated in a horrifying humanitarian crisis. International human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and the UN have all concluded that Israel’s offensive in Gaza and the West Bank is a genocide.
As the world watched, institutions, experts, news outlets and individuals all scrambled to find answers in the past and present that could rationalise such an atrocity. Outlets from the BBC and Sky, to Crashcourse and History YouTubers, published deep dives and articles attempting to explain a century of conflict and the current horrors being documented on every screen and in every newspaper.
The film documents the events leading to the 1936 Arab revolt through the eyes of three generations of Palestinians, using both fictional and archival footage. Palestine 36 opens with a scene recounting the first radio broadcast in Palestine. The film concludes with Khouloud’s (Yasmine Al Massri) heartbreak as she listens to the announcement over the radio of the partition of her country under the British Mandate.
It would be all too easy for me to dissect the film as a historical epic made now, because of the genocide being perpetrated against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. There is a temptation to search the story for every event that could somehow explain the violence we are witnessing today.
Palestine 36 is not concerned with rationalising a genocide. The film never lets the audience forget that the motives of imperialism are not the concern of the lives between the lines of history books or opinion pieces. We follow a collection of characters in all spheres of Palestinian life under British rule: village communities, farmers, elders, children, and journalist Khouloud and her husband living in the high society of Jerusalem. There is a supporting cast of British characters, the vindictive Captain Windgate (Robert Aramayo), the sympathetic diplomat Thomas (Billy Howle), and the severe High Commissioner Wauchope (Jeremy Irons). Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya), a village boy working as a driver for Khouloud, moves between his village and the city as tensions between the Palestinian people and the British government rise.
Each time Yusuf returns to the village, there is an escalation in the repression perpetrated against his community. Their land is reallocated to Jewish settlers, their freedom of movement restricted, and the government’s desperation to quell any kind of rebellion or Palestinian nationalism results in beatings, raids, the burning of fields and the execution of their people.
The indigenous people, the villagers that we meet, and the families that have resided in ancient small holdings and built their lives, and lives for their ancestors in the hills surrounding Jerusalem, care deeply for the land that sustains them. The land nurtures them, and they nurture the land. By the systems of colonialism, it is one of the first things to be pulled from under their feet.
It’s through this lens that family and land become the film’s most vital and emotive threads of narrative. The family does not exist as a narrative tool by which to explore the conditions suffered in Gaza and the West Bank today. What matters to them is immediate.
The most pervasive symbol of rebellion, and a generational resistance against this tyranny, is the Turkish-made pistol. Smuggled into the village by Afra’s mother, Um (Yumna Marwan), and hidden in trees, caves and bushes from British soldiers, the weapon fascinates both Afra and her friend Kareem (Ward Helou). Kareem, still a boy, understands why he must hide it, why he must never let the British picnickers, though they seem peaceful, see it. When Afra searches for what her mother has hidden between rugs and blankets, her grandmother wakes. Her curiosity about the weapon and the dangers of keeping it in their home prompts the conversation and the question of what is more powerful than Empires.
The pistol contains a single bullet. The discovery of its sheath is the excuse the British authorities use to raid Afra’s village and pillage the ancient homes of the community. They shoot a man without trial in front of children, and they burn land and destroy stores of grain. The threat of the torture of Kareem forces his father to reveal a stash of weapons hidden by rebels. And though this should satisfy the soldiers, the discovery of the sheath- the hint of the existence of a weapon in the hands of the people they so desperately seek to erase- drives them to destroy the village and kill every man that could become a rebel.
There are a few more fitting metaphors for the pervasive evil of imperialism- a gun, a single bullet and a child against an army. The pistol becomes a physical symbol of a refusal to be erased. The British never find it.
After the destruction of the village, and the words of Um to the boy ‘there is work to be done,’ Kareem does not turn back to rebuild what is broken. On foot, he takes the pistol to Jerusalem and levels it against the British guard who killed his father.
We don’t bear witness to the consequences. We never know what happens to Kareem, nor the pistol. Perhaps he escapes, perhaps he doesn’t. The withholding of a definitive answer immortalises the pistol and the boy as a continuation of the story we understand to be attached to it. The spirit of the Palestinian history, rebellion and identity will survive. Sons will remember their fathers, no matter the effort expended to erase them.
None of the events depicted in Palestine 36 is the narrative engineering of the screenwriter or filmmaker, nor are they a reaction inspired solely by the war today.
The tools of oppression depicted in the film, the use of collective punishment, terror, propaganda, public hangings and concentration camps are language and images that connote the cruellest crimes of war. In its depiction of the British Empire, the violence perpetrated against the village and Afra’s becomes a careful, mournful hymn to every nation and culture that suffered at the hands of colonial rule.
Yusuf, travelling between Jerusalem and his village, returns to find his family and community confined behind a makeshift barbed wire fence. The zealous, zionist Captain Windgate withholds water from his prisoners and beats Yusuf when he passes a canteen from a nearby stream. There are those we know to be innocent suffering behind the barbed wire. Children and elders are suffering in the sun.
The perpetrations of the British Empire and the tools of any institution that believes itself ‘morally’ or ‘culturally’ superior to any other civilisation are the same. Palestine 36 has no fear in referencing other countries and peoples that suffered greatly under the rule of the British Empire.
It’s a radical history of the Empire to expose a British audience to. Not because of any collective ignorance or naivety, but because of the conscious efforts of our government to separate any association of our country with the kind of atrocities and images documented in Palestine 36. Gordon Brown once remarked that ‘Britain was not about to apologise for the Empire.’ As education secretary, Michael Gove commissioned pro-British Empire historians to rework the school curriculum to centre the ‘Glories’ of the Empire. Policies that remove the perspective of occupied countries in history classes have been justified by a wish not to ‘confuse’ children or ‘politicise the classroom’. These policies haven’t changed much to this date.
When Lord Robert Peel is assigned to investigate the unrest in Palestine, there is a specific reference to how he suppressed dissent in occupied India. In a meeting of British administrators, Tegart, a police chief, declares to the commissioners that ‘we don’t want another Ireland on our hands’. The violence, means, and even the specific individuals the British employed to subdue dissent in occupied India and Ireland, draw a parallel and an empathy between the plight of the Palestinian people and all peoples victimised by the actions of the Empire.
When Afra asks her mother why the Jewish settlers are coming to their land, she replies, ‘Their countries do not want them.’ When Britain was awarded the Palestinian mandate by the League of Nations, the UK foreign secretary Arthur Balfour pledged to establish a ‘Jewish national home.’ Amidst persecution and antisemitism in Europe, Britain and America stopped allowing Jewish refugees to enter the countries and instead deported Jews to Palestine. Zionism became British Foreign policy. Um’s explanation to Afra serves both to remind us of truths buried by colonial powers and to extend the empathy for those persecuted based on identity to the Jewish settlers.
Palestine 36 is revolutionary in its depiction of the British Empire. It is also revolutionary in its existence. The identity and truths that are passed from generation to generation within the narrative of the film are also the things that produce the film itself. To watch Palestine 36 in a sold-out screen in central London is a living, enigmatic, dynamic representation that the plight of Afra’s family and her village has succeeded. That a Palestinian filmmaker can recount their story means that they have not been erased or eradicated.
The film was screened at 5:30 on a Sunday evening- at a cinema near five major tube stations, in the centre of a city with countless schools, families, religions and cultures. The film showed early enough for children to get back home and not be too tired for school in the morning, on a day that many 9-5 parents could make.
I came to understand why the presence of the young boy in the screen, and his father helping him understand what was happening in the film, had struck me. That a father can bring his son, and whisper explanations of a history that may be buried by his school or government, prevails as a thing more powerful than Empires.
In the words of the Mandate, the British occupation of Palestine would last ‘until they can stand alone’. Trump’s 20-point peace plan, recently approved by the UN Security Council, is eerily parallel to the Peele commission and the white papers before it. The creation of a Peace committee, the surrender of weapons, and the installation of British politicians like Tony Blair overseeing the reconstruction and development of Gaza, is a terrifying continuation of the cycles of violence that Palestine 36 portrays. Palestine 36 tells us that Palestinians know their land, they know their history. They understand the truth and horror of it. To ever be free from history repeating itself, we need to look to our lands, our history- no matter how uncomfortable it might be.
Palestine 36 is in UK cinemas now.
Image courtesy of London Palestine Film Festival
